Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean the Far-Right Isn't Coming to Get You

The Politics of Fantasy (3)

In his seminal 1964 essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter famously coined the term ‘paranoid style’ to describe what he called ‘the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’ to which he regarded the extreme right as especially prone.   Hofstadter didn’t argue that this ‘style’ was uniquely rightwing, only that extreme right politics tended to propagate a vision of politics exemplified by a 1951 speech by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951 on the communist menace:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. 

The essential narrative components of the ‘paranoid style’ are all present in these few lines: the belief that society stands on the brink of collapse; a vast conspiracy in which the highest levels of government are complicit; an enemy so evil that no moral compromise can be made with it.  

These ingredients will be entirely familiar to our own era of rampant paranoia and deranged political fantasy.  From QAnon and the Great Replacement to the Great Reset, the extreme right is awash with grand conspiracy theories that ‘ dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man’, involving anything from paedophilia and cannibalism at the highest level of government, to the destruction of the white race and the deliberate creation of a global pandemic by sinister ‘elites’ intent on total ‘control.’

None of is entirely new, because in history, nothing ever is.  Nazism owed its emotional appeal not just to fantasies of racial superiority, but to paranoid and antisemitic grand conspiracy theories, in which the racial, national and ‘biological’ existence of the German people was under threat from Bolshevism and ‘International Jewry.’

In the early 1990s, the US right was awash with foaming-at-the-mouth ‘patriot’ militias advocated armed resistance to equally dark and fantastic conspiracies about the ‘New World Order’ and the ‘Zionist Occupation Government.’ In the first decade of the new century,  Islamophobic pseudo-scholars such as Bat Y’eor argued that that European governments were complicit in an equally nefarious plot to transform Europe into a colony of Islam called ‘Eurabia’,  

Given these precedents, we can’t be entirely surprised by the current eruption of the ‘paranoid style’ across a spectrum that now includes not just the extreme right but mainstream rightwing political parties.  

In the US in particular,  the firewall between the Republican Party and the extremist fringe has entirely broken down, to the point when the wildest conspiracies course freely through social media platforms and rightwing media outlets that inform the views of millions of people, and where elected congressional representatives – not to mention the former president himself – have expressed support or sympathy for the maniacal – and to any objective analysis, nonsensical – QAnon movement.

In January last year, we saw where these tendencies can lead, when Trump supporters saturated in QAnon messages assaulted the US Capitol.  But the UK is by no means immune to this kind of thinking.  In the last few months, anti-vaxx direct action activists have increasingly targeted doctors, nurses, and medical personnel, and some of them appear to be emulating US militias with similar views.  

A movement calling itself Alpha Men Assemble (AMA) has called for ‘professional men’ to acquire black uniforms, and its members have engaged in unarmed combat training in preparation for its coming ‘war’ on government Covid policy. Another group called Veterans 4 Freedom has hosted social media conversations that refer to violent insurrections in which vaccination centres are targeted.

‘Anti vaxxers’, like ‘anti-lockdowners’ cover a fairly wide spectrum; not everyone who espouses these ideas can be considered a potential fascist, but Covid denialism and its various offshoots have become part of the toxic pool which the extreme right has sought to exploit for its own benefit. 

Once again, these outcomes do have precedents. In Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, Eric Kurlander traced the growth of pseudoscience, neo-paganism, magic and the occult, and racialised conspiracism during the Third Reich,  in which

Many Germans – and certainly most Nazis -viewed themselves after the First World War as a colonized people, subject to the exterminatory whims and fantasies of the ethnic and political other: whether the Jews, Bolsheviks, and Slavs; the British, French, and Belgians; or the North African troops that briefly occupied the Ruhr.

In Kurlander’s formulation

This feeling of subaltern status, biopolitical insecurity, and territorial loss, when combined with supernatural fantasies about race and space, provided a powerful justification for violent action against a variety of ‘monsters’ in domestic and foreign policy. 

The Politics of Fear

Some of these features are present in our own era, amongst white majorities obsessed by theories of their coming ‘replacement’; in ‘left behind’ communities abandoned by their governments, which have come to distrust all politicians and any government; in the ‘biopolitical’ impact of the pandemic.  We now live in an era in which we are constantly invited to imagine not just that governments may be bad, or useless, or corrupt, but puppets of the diabolical forces pulling their strings.

This image of a world entirely in thrall to all-powerful evil global forces  intent on subjugating and destroying those who have not yet taken the red pill, is a recurring theme in extreme right conspiracism, and the twenty-first century is awash with it

From scientists propagating a ‘scamdemic’, and Democrat politicians ‘stealing the presidency’ while engaging in cannibalistic orgies to plutocrats seeking to put microchips in our blood through vaccines,  all these ‘new’ enemies are variants in older stories to which the extreme right has always been prone, and which have always been politically useful. 

This usefulness isn’t just a reflection of  Voltaire’s dictum that ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’.  That is certainly part of it, just as Steve Bannon’s strategy of ‘flooding the zone with shit’ undoubtedly explains the enthusiasm with which extreme right politicians and activists have embraced the absurd and outlandish ‘theories’ propagated by the likes of ‘Q’, Alex Jones, or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But such theories tend to flourish in periods of instability and insecurity, whether cultural, political or economic.  Because if there is one emotion that underpins almost every grand conspiracy theory, from the Illuminati, the ‘Elders of Zion’, QAnon or the Great Reset – it is fear. 

In nervous, fearful times, people are more likely to look for pseudo-interpretations of events and tendencies that they find troubling or disturbing or incomprehensible, and the extreme right will always be willing to make them even more fearful than they already, because environments based on chaos, fear and instability are the only ones in which the extreme right can hope to make headway. 

To put it simply, the more frightened and confused people are, the more the right seeks to benefit, and the more evil the conspiracy, the more frightened and confused they will be. 

That said, democratic governments from the centre-left to the centre-right, bear some of the responsibility for laying the seedbed which has produced such toxic fruit.  Throughout the ‘9/11 decades’, politicians routinely used the (exaggerated) threat of global terrorist conspiracies to terrify their population into supporting the new era of endless war and extra-legal repression. 

Again and again, serious security threats to life and limb was represented as apocalyptic dangers that threatened the very basis of civilisation, and then used as a justification for spurious ‘one percent doctrines’ and an endless ‘war on terror’ in which no final victory was ever possible. 

Too often, governments that should have been articulating a coherent and achievable vision of the common good, preferred to frighten voters with narratives of an ‘axis of evil’ and the ‘enemy within.’ 

So the far-right didn’t invent the ‘politics of fear’; to some extent the climate that made these politics possible already existed, and until governments can offer a more inspiring and reassuring vision of what good government can do, and what kind of future we might inhabit, the fear will continue to percolate, and the right will continue to spread it - the better to profit from it.